"STILL STANDING" Exhibit Spotlight

The Col. Abraham Hasbrouck House
135 Green Street, Kingston, NY

Our 2024 exhibit STILL STANDING highlights twelve structures which were protected and preserved by members of our community. This month's newsletter features the Colonel Abraham Hasbrouck House. We invited current owner Jed Schmidt to share his thoughts about the house's history and the restoration process.
Thoughts on the Col. Hasbrouck House
by Jed Schmidt
Jed, Minja, and Ko on the front steps of 135 Green Street with their dog, Bo.
Photo by Tim Burger
I'm from the Hudson Valley, and my wife is from Germany. We met while both living in Tokyo, but moved shortly thereafter to New York. A year later, when a good friend of mine bought and restored the Van Keuren House across the street from our house, we came to Kingston for a visit and really liked what we saw. It was close enough but not too close to the city, very walkable, and relatively quiet. So with little attachment to (or really, affection for) New York City, two work-from-home jobs, and a kid on the way, Kingston made a lot of sense as the place to start our family together.
 
We had seen the Colonel Hasbrouck House on our visits to our friends across the street, but didn't know its history and frankly didn't think much of it. My wife said it looked like a Hexenhäus (haunted house); it was painted entirely in dark maroon and overrun with ivy (you can still see it on Google Maps as it was back then, since the Google Street View car hasn't been past since the summer of 2012). The house had apparently been on sale for years (unthinkable for an uptown property these days), but like any other property, only caught our attention when it showed up on Zillow.
We had no idea how much work was ahead of us. Over the years the house had been chopped up into six apartments (one of which was occupied by a squatter), so it didn't qualify for a residential mortgage. Our bank wouldn't appraise the house at the accepted offer price. Our friends and families balked at the condition the house was in, probably since it hadn't been owner-occupied for near a century. But the idea of living in a piece of history on a quiet, walkable block shared by several other families with newborns who could grow up together really appealed to us, so we bit the bullet, bought the house, and started reading up on its history (much thanks to the Historic Huguenot Street archives and local author of history, A.J. Schenkman).
Our original plan was just to move into one of the unoccupied apartments in the house, and renovate piecemeal as the opportunity came up. But shortly after buying the house, we found out that its resident caretaker was moving out after 40 years living there, and given there were only two tenants left, we decided the house deserved some long-overdue attention. So we enlisted the help of Scott Dutton Architecture to help us navigate the restoration (including state historic rehabilitation tax credits), which started with a lot of discovery work to read the house and figure out what should be kept and what should not.
We decided to consolidate the existing six apartments into three, giving each apartment its own external door and reclaiming a lot of the unused common space. This meant removing a lot of walls, but one nice thing about stone houses like ours is that there are few interior load-bearing walls, since that work is mostly done by the hemlock beams running the width of the house; we exposed these wherever possible. We emptied all the bricks that filled in the seven fireboxes in the house, none of which had been used for a long time (and when used burned coal, not cordwood). We hired a historical mason to fix and repoint the fireboxes and chimneys, including a beehive oven that we discovered in the summer kitchen downstairs. We stripped the wide plank floors of dozens of layers of (mostly lead) paint to bring them back to the original heart pine, an immense task that I foolishly took on myself. But after months of the noise, smoke, and sparks of drum-sanding and angle-grinding we came out with really nice floors that better anchor the house in the period in which it was built. And while we lost a good deal of wood in the house due to rot, we've slowly been replacing it with the planks we milled from four large maple and spruce trees that we felled in the backyard when we moved in.
Overall, the restoration process took more time and money than we anticipated, about one year until we could move in to the first apartment, and two more to finish the others. Keeping things on a budget was a source of constant stress, and the whole project went sideways a few times. But I think the house needed it, and we learned a lot in the process, about both the history of the house and the process of restoration.

The Colonel Hasbrouck House was built around 1735, and as far as we can tell, was expanded twice. The first extended the house northwards about half its width, and the second extended the house upwards with a second-story gable. Given the former was done with the original limestone and the latter in bluestone, these extensions probably correlate to Kingston's respective 18th- and 19th-century heydays. This mix of Dutch and Victorian influence can also be seen in the house's menagerie of windows, from the wavy panes of the former to the ovals and arches of the latter.
The wide plank pine floors and hemlock beams in the house probably date back to around after the Revolutionary War. While many folks are familiar with the Burning of Kingston in 1777, a good chunk of uptown Kingston was affected by a fire that originated in the attic of this house the year prior. We're told that the Colonel lived a few blocks away in the duration, and didn't rebuild the house until after the war.
 
(And I'm not sure it's a feature, but the house is the only one on the block without a driveway. While the Colonel owned the land on which both of our neighbors' houses sit, it was eventually sold off to within feet of the north and south exterior walls.)
To me, the most salient part of the history of this house is actually the one most recently discovered. While the Colonel diligently kept a diary from which much of Kingston's colonial history is known, we found out a few years ago from the Friends of Historic Kingston that the house was home to Sojourner Truth, who lived and worked here in 1828 during her landmark trial to win the freedom of her illegally enslaved son. And the lawyer that helped her win the case, the first-ever for a black woman in court in America, was the Colonel's grandson, Abraham Bruyn Hasbrouck. Given that we know that the Colonel himself kept slaves in the house, it's gratifying to know a Hasbrouck of the same name two generations later played such a pivotal role in the story of abolition in America. We installed a New York State historical marker in front of the house to commemorate its small spot in the long arc towards justice.